Better Enforcement Through Community

Last week, a supposed compromise was reached on immigration reform between Bush, Congressional Democrats, and Congressional Republicans. There appears to be a very small chance at best that the compromise will make it into law, not least of all because Bush would have to push it pretty hard--which he doesn't seem particularly interested in doing. Personally, I wouldn't listen to anything he says if I were a policy maker anyway. But it also happens to sound like a really terrible policy.

Check out some of the details of the three biggest compromises in the compromise:

• "The first [Democratic concession to conservatives] would make illegal immigrants' access to long-term visas and the new guest-worker program contingent upon the implementation of the border crackdown."
  
• "Another sticking point came from the proposed replacement of an immigration system primarily designed to reunify families with a point system that would give new emphasis to skills and education.... points would be granted to migrants with work experience in high-demand occupations and who have worked for a U.S.-based firm. Additional points would be awarded based on education levels, English proficiency and family ties."
• "Finally, immigrants coming into the country under the temporary work program would have to leave when their permits expire, with no chance to appeal for permanent residence. Labor unions say such a system would depress wages and create an underclass."

I don't have a big problem with making it contingent on some improvements to enforcement. But all these crusades to build a wall or a burning river of gasoline or something along the border are idiotic. I also have a problem with the crackdown coming first, since this will mean that a bunch of bitter immigrants will see us being assholes for several years before they ever get to the part that's good for them. Speaking of which, even that part isn't very good for them.

One of the big advantages the US has always had over Europe in terms of immigration is that (a) immigrants can bring their families and (b) they can eventually become citizens. This helps keep them from becoming radicalized. Guest worker programs are more of a European thing, and anyone who is serious about opposing terrorism will oppose them since they prevent (a) and (b) from happening. If anything, Europe should be emulating our system, not the other way around. Let's revisit what happened in Europe:

The mass immigration of Muslims to Europe was an unintended consequence of post-World War II guest-worker programs.... Today, Muslims constitute the majority of immigrants in most western European countries, including Belgium, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, and the largest single component of the immigrant population in the United Kingdom....

Unlike the jumble of nationalities that make up the American Latino community, the Muslims of western Europe are likely to be distinct, cohesive, and bitter. In Europe, host countries that never learned to integrate newcomers collide with immigrants exceptionally retentive of their ways, producing a variant of what the French scholar Olivier Roy calls "globalized Islam": militant Islamic resentment at Western dominance, anti-imperialism exalted by revivalism.

Being a guest worker means you are supposedly in the country temporarily at the discretion of some employer. This means that you have no incentive to contribute to a community you are only visiting. Your employer can exploit you, because he can send you back if you try to organize or demand better treatment. There's no sense bringing a family with you, since it'll be cheaper to support them by sending money back to the home country. Since you will have no family or friends in your new neighborhood, you will be bored and restless and horny. If we're lucky, those ingredients will only be a recipe for an Old West-style environment of vice. If we're unlucky, that will mean your only friend, the only day-to-day reminder of some sort of purpose in your life, is the radical cleric who runs your local mosque.

But corporations, famous for acting in their own interest only, sure seem to like guest worker programs. Let's check in with David Sirota from April:

“Where Are All The Workers? Companies worldwide are suddenly scrambling to manage a labor crunch.” This is the public rationale from corporate executives (especially in the high-tech industries) for massive job outsourcing and exploitation of the H-1B program: We can’t find the workers we need. We are expected, for instance, to ignore academic studies published recently by the National Academy of Sciences showing that, in fact, there is no shortage of high-tech engineers here in America. We are expected to ignore the data showing that companies are using the H-1B program to drive down domestic workers’ wages by forcing them into competition with imported workers from impoverished countries.

Judging by their reaction to the compromise, the captains of industry really are still expecting these things from us. Here, by way of Kevin Drum, is that corporate reaction, playing right into the script:

Robert Hoffman, a VP at Oracle, is unhappy with the new immigration bill, which includes a "point system" that allocates visas to applicants with education and job skills:

"Under the current system," Mr. Hoffman said, "you need an employer to sponsor you for a green card. Under the point system, you would not need an employer as a sponsor. An individual would get points for special skills, but those skills may not match the demand. You can't hire a chemical engineer to do the work of a software engineer."

If nothing else, you have to admire the chutzpah Hoffman demonstrates here.... The idea that someone can simply get a green card without going through a sponsor and then freely work for the highest bidder is not really what high-tech CFOs have in mind when they dream of filling up job slots with foreign workers.

In other words: untying the H-1B visa program from employer sponsorship isn't such a bad idea. But untying immigrants from planting roots and forming communities is a horrible idea. Immigration can indeed be a useful tool in counter-terrorism, as some have hoped. But it is most useful when it gets communities to police themselves, not when it builds a harsher society.

Shifting Coalitions and the Politics of War Crimes

Once upon a time, Karl Rove dreamed of putting together a coalition of voting blocs that would form an unbreakable permanent majority. Bush was at the helm of a conservative movement that would maintain Republicans' current strength with neocons (=neoconservatives, those who believe US might makes right), theocons (=those who support prayer in schools, Moral Majority, et al.), and paleocons (=those who are fiscally conservative but otherwise libertarian, a/k/a Eisenhower Republicans).

Together with some swing voters they were able to lure consistently over several elections, this Republican movement was able to maintain a razor-thin majority in Congress and in presidential elections for several cycles.

Then, somewhere between Katrina and Iraq, Social Security and Terry Schiavo, people realized that Bush was doing a horrible job. His approval ratings tumbled into the low 40% range, and they have been around 28-35% all throughout this year. But despite the consensus that Bush is the worst president ever, he consistently draws about 30% in the polls. So who's been peeling off, and who's left?

One group that has been peeling off is made up of people who are sort of conservative but justd not totally batshit insane. Like former Republican (and commander of forces in Iraq) Gen. John Abizaid:
Senator Jim Webb (D-VA) is another former Republican who couldn't stand it any more. He won his first race last fall.

As you may have guessed, the 30%ers who still support Bush by and large actually are crazy. Check out Paul Krugman's description of the scene at the Republican debate on Tuesday:

[A]side from John McCain, who to his credit echoed Gen. Petraeus (and was met with stony silence), the candidates spoke enthusiastically in favor of torture and against the rule of law. Rudy Giuliani endorsed waterboarding. Mitt Romney declared that he wants accused terrorists at Guantánamo, "where they don’t get the access to lawyers they get when they’re on our soil ... My view is, we ought to double Guantánamo." His remarks were greeted with wild applause....

What we need to realize is that the infamous "Bush bubble," the administration’s no-reality zone, extends a long way beyond the White House. Millions of Americans believe that patriotic torturers are keeping us safe, that there’s a vast Islamic axis of evil, that victory in Iraq is just around the corner, that Bush appointees are doing a heckuva job — and that news reports contradicting these beliefs reflect liberal media bias.

And the Republican nomination will go either to someone who shares these beliefs, and would therefore run the country the same way Mr. Bush has, or to a very, very good liar.

The 30%ers who still support Bush are the remainder of the coalition, now that the reasonable people have split off. The paleocons like Abizaid and Webb have left over issues like torture. And since they applaud waterboarding but sit on their hands when their candidate speaks against torture, it becomes clear that the 30%ers will not support a candidate unless he supports war crimes:

At the end of the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East of which the United States was a leading member (the Tribunal was established by Douglas MacArthur) convicted former Japanese Prime Minister Tojo and numerous other generals and admirals of a panoply of war crimes. Among them was torture:

The practice of torturing prisoners of war and civilian internees prevailed at practically all places occupied by Japanese troops, both in the occupied territories and in Japan. The Japanese indulged in this practice during the entire period of the Pacific War. Methods of torture were employed in all areas so uniformly as to indicate policy both in training and execution. Among these tortures were the water treatment...

The so-called "water treatment" was commonly applied. The victim was bound or otherwise secured in a prone position; and water was forced through his mouth and nostrils into his lungs and stomach until he lost consciousness. Pressure was then applied, sometimes by jumping upon his abdomen to force the water out. The usual practice was to revive the victim and successively repeat the process.

Support for war crimes makes Rudy Giuliani a good choice for the neocon wing. But the theocons just can't get behind a guy who has such a dodgy record of marriages and support for abortion. So the 30%ers are threatening to splinter even more.

There is some danger that people will only see Bush's criminally poor job performance as a reflection of his unique leadership abilities, when in fact his performance has been the perfect embodiment of his movement's principles. Conservatives may be disowning Bush, but they are not abandoning his horrible world view. Some people are worried that the lack of philosophical unity among the new Democratic supporters will translate to flimsy support. I don't think we have anything to worry about as long as Republicans stick with Bush in principle, if not in name.

Breaking the Camel's Back

If ever there was any doubt that George W. Bush needs to be impeached, the testimony we heard yesterday should lay it to rest. A former top aide to Attorney General John Ashcroft testified yesterday about a series of events that sounds more like the climax of a Hollywood thriller than like a government playing by the rules. From the Post:

On the night of March 10, 2004, as Attorney General John D. Ashcroft lay ill in an intensive-care unit, his deputy, James B. Comey, received an urgent call.

White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales and President Bush's chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., were on their way to the hospital to persuade Ashcroft to reauthorize Bush's domestic surveillance program, which the Justice Department had just determined was illegal.

In vivid testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday, Comey said he alerted FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and raced, sirens blaring, to join Ashcroft in his hospital room, arriving minutes before Gonzales and Card. Ashcroft, summoning the strength to lift his head and speak, refused to sign the papers they had brought. Gonzales and Card, who had never acknowledged Comey's presence in the room, turned and left.

That's right, John Ashcroft, who liberals love to hate for trampling civil liberties with the Patriot Act and various other awful conservative offenses, is actually the good guy here. He recognized that Bush's blatantly illegal domestic spying order was illegal, and he refused to sign off on it. The second in command of the Department of Justice had to bring the head of the FBI to Ashcroft's hospital bed to keep Bush's goons from forcing his signature.

Apparently Comey also testified that if he, Ashcroft, Ashcroft's chief of staff, and the head of the FBI hadn't all threatened to resign over the program, Bush would have gone ahead with it anyway. Now, just to be clear, the program is still illegal, to this very day. So whatever change Bush conceded to in order to appease Comey et al. doesn't solve the problem or make Comey and Ashcroft into actual good guys. But in this Administration, just being less evil makes you look like a saint.

As Glenn Greenwald implies today, there is no solution for the problems this creates short of impeachment:

The overarching point here, as always, is that it is simply crystal clear that the President consciously and deliberately violated the law and committed multiple felonies by eavesdropping on Americans in violation of the law.

Recall that the only federal court to rule on this matter has concluded that the NSA program violated both federal law and the U.S. Constitution...

Yet even once Bush knew that both Aschcroft and Comey believed the eavesdropping was illegal, he ordered it to continue anyway. As Anonymous Liberal wrote yesterday:

That's a rather stunning fact, and one that I wish at least a few mainstream journalists would attempt to grasp the significance of. The White House authorized a program that everyone of significance in the Justice Department had determined to be lacking any legal basis. They willfully violated the law.

As Dan Froomkin writes today, trying to get a sick guy to sign a paper is never going to be considered the worst thing this Administration has done. But it may be the one thing that makes all the other stuff make sense. It might exemplify the rest of the misconduct, somehow symbolizing it for people who don't have time to follow the ins and outs of emails about purging prosecutors. It might, in other words, step into the role the Mark Foley scandal played last fall. To quote myself:

the Mark Foley scandal from last October--it's not that Republican leadership really influenced policy by protecting a sexual predator, it's [that] they helped people condense the narrative of corruption and arrogance that surrounded the Republican Congress. We also know from the groundbreaking work of Samuel Popkin that voters tend to form a narrative and then adjust it with new information, rather than constantly weighing and reweighing all the evidence.

But as cool as I feel for drawing that analogy, I felt even more vindicated to see the following in the Post editorial page:

JAMES B. COMEY, the straight-as-an-arrow former No. 2 official at the Justice Department, yesterday offered the Senate Judiciary Committee an account of Bush administration lawlessness so shocking it would have been unbelievable coming from a less reputable source.

You may recall that my very most recent blog post was about how the Administration got away with so much just by doing things that people couldn't believe an Administration would do. At that time, I relied on Kevin Drum's assessment of the situation, which I now re-cite:

One of the great discoveries of the Republican Party over the past decade or two is that an awful lot of the rules we take for granted are, in reality, just traditions. Like redistricting only once a decade, for example, or keeping House votes open for 15 minutes. And what Republicans have found out is that if you have the balls to do it, you can just ignore tradition and no one can stop you. It's that simple. Alberto Gonzales has learned this lesson well. Normally, cabinet officers who have been caught in multiple obvious lies have to either resign or else seriously try to defend themselves. But Gonzales realizes this is just tradition.

So the Washington Post editorial board provides the other reason this may be such an important development in the scandal. Just to review, the first reason is that this is easy to remember, and it symbolizes the larger problem. The second reason is that the gatekeepers of establishment knowledge, who are too blind to see the obvious when it is spread out in front of them, may finally get it when it is sitting in front of them nicely gift-wrapped. Let's hope so.

US Congress, featuring Fleetwood Mac

The House Judiciary Committee invited Alberto Gonzales to testify yesterday, but he apparently heard an invitation to come tell lies, in the finest Fleetwood Mac tradition.

Although, to be fair to Gonzales, some of the things he said would be more accurately classified as non-sequiters than lies. Slate's Dahlia Lithwick has been providing excellent coverage of the Gonzales saga, and she chimes in with an perceptive take on the proceedings in yesterday's issue.

Lithwick describes "a divine moment of stunned silence when he insists, toward the end of the hearing, that 'it would be almost impossible to make a political decision in the Justice Department. ... If that happened we would read about it in the paper.' " Technically, this is a lie. The paper trail has shown just how easy it would be to make a political decision in the DoJ. You can also tell it's a lie, because you have in fact read about it in the papers. But it's just such an obvious, brazen lie, really only half-heartedly masquerading as truth, that it seems like a joke. A non-sequiter, something so random as to be inherently hilarious.

The "testimony" Gonzales gave yesterday is full of these fun little nonsensical moments. Lithwick goes on:

[T]he AG proves himself to be as defiantly incurious as his boss. He tells the committee at various times that he didn't read the CRS report detailing how previous administrations handled U.S. attorney dismissals. He didn't read the University of Minnesota study that broke down the disparity in investigations of Democrats over Republicans. He tells Maxine Waters, D-Calif., that he still has not read the fired U.S. attorneys' personnel files. He notes several times that he hasn't much read the newspapers. He tells Sanchez that he still doesn't know who at Justice had more than "limited input" into these decisions. The most revealing moment, perhaps, is when Gonzales inadvertently confesses that some members of this secret cabal of senior leaders may not have even "known that they were involved in making this list."

These statements are probably a lot more true, but they have the same non-sequiter property that the lies do: instead of describing something obviously false, though, they describe someone obviously incompetent.

For someone who is so incompetent at running the Department of Justice (and at testifying before Congress, for that matter), Gonzales sure sounds like he was relaxed. But why shouldn't he be? He doesn't serve the American people, he serves the White House. And the White House is behind him all the way, and he knows it. Plus, the longer he doesn't resign, the easier it is for Republicans to claim that the fact he hasn't resigned shows nothing bad could have happened.

There are several possible reasons why Bush might not want to fire Gonzales. For one, if Gonzales leaves, Bush will need to submit a new candidate for AG to Senate confirmation hearings. If that happens, all sorts of fun documents will probably come to light. For another, Bush is obdurate and often refuses to do the right thing simply because he wasn't doing it already (see also: Iraq, invasion and occupation of).

But the most convincing explanation is the one Kevin Drum has articulated:

One of the great discoveries of the Republican Party over the past decade or two is that an awful lot of the rules we take for granted are, in reality, just traditions. Like redistricting only once a decade, for example, or keeping House votes open for 15 minutes. And what Republicans have found out is that if you have the balls to do it, you can just ignore tradition and no one can stop you. It's that simple. Alberto Gonzales has learned this lesson well. Normally, cabinet officers who have been caught in multiple obvious lies have to either resign or else seriously try to defend themselves. But Gonzales realizes this is just tradition.

I would add to his examples the tradition of not lying. That seems basic and obvious, but I really think respect for that tradition is what allowed many people to rationalize letting us get into Iraq in the first place. The evidence for WMDs was shaky at best, but surely the President wouldn't say it if it weren't true. Either way, Drum is right: our democracy is not well set up to stop people who intentionally try to destroy it from the inside.

Got to Give it Up

In my last post, I talked about the hypocrisy of Republicans who are setting a timeline in September after dragging every other proponent of a timeline through the mud for years. Well, this may shock you, but I found some more Republican hypocrisy since then. This time they're trying to harass the Iraqi politburo, or whatever joke of a legislative body "runs" their country, into giving up its two month summer vacation.

In order to think this is an important problem, you have to assume that the legislative body there actually controls anything about the country. But from the violence and failed infrastructure, combined with the foreign military occupation and mass resignations, I would say they don't.

But Dick Cheney says they do. Specifically, he was scheduled to say that on his visit today. At the press availability this morning, the US Ambassador to Iraq mentioned that Cheney would talk about the vacation:

"The reality is, with the major effort we’re making, the major effort the Iraqi security forces and military are making themselves, for the Iraqi parliament to take a two-month vacation in the middle of summer if [sic] impossible to understand," [US Ambassador Ryan] Crocker said.

I would have to say I agree with that. But I'm quite surprised to hear about it coming from this party. The 109th Congress (last term's; dominated by Republicans) worked the fewest days AND failed to even complete its most basic legislative duties. Bush set the record for laziest President ever (measured by vacation days) almost two years ago. Most famously, Bush insisted on prolonging his vacation while thousands died in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.

But this problem of vacations just dovetails with the larger Republican problem of connection with reality. Guys: it's too little too late. Sing it with me now: you got to give it up. If working on this pressing problem (so pressing that approximately 3,400 Americans are dead because of it) was so important to you, why did you take all those vacation days? And that brings us to Cheney's other statement. Apparently today he was scheduled to say, among other things, that:

We’ve got to get this work done. It’s game time.

As others have pointed out, what is it about a war ravaging through the Middle East for the last four years that makes it "game time" only just now? Was there a time when this was not important? Were you only giving this partial effort before, since it wasn't game time? Up til now, have we just been talking about practice?

Tenet and Iraq

Former CIA director George Tenet was in the news last week for his new book on the build up to the invasion of Iraq. Basically no one is buying the premise of the book (although people appear to be buying the book itself, which ranks #11 on Amazon as of this writing). In the words of Wonkette, the premise can be expressed thusly: George Tenet's Book Absolves George Tenet.

Basically everything I've read about the book (although I have not and will not read the book itself) agrees with Wonkette: it is a self-serving pile of crap. Conservatives think he is rewriting history to make the Administration look bad, and just about everyone else thinks he is rewriting it to make himself look good. If he really felt so uncomfortable with the invasion, one might note, well, he was pretty much the one person in the best position to stop it.

But instead, he marched along to the invasion drumbeat when that's everyone else wanted, and, now that everyone else wants out of Iraq, he has a book saying that's what he always wanted too. Many people have seen the Medal of Freedom Bush gave Tenet as a sort of quid pro quo for (a) not blowing the whistle on the bogus WMD intelligence and (b) stepping down to take the fall for the failure to actually find any. Of course, despite all his righteous indignation, Tenet has announced that he will not be returning that particular medal, thank you very much.

As luck would have it, yours truly 'got' to hear a speech from Tenet himself a couple years back. I and several hundred of my classmates got to hear Tenet on May 17, 2003. George W. Bush had just steamrolled us into Iraq, and the invasion was already a mission accomplished. War opponents such as myself had essentially no representation around Washington, whether in government or my classrooms. When the speech concluded, I swallowed the bile building up in the back of my throat long enough to clap, but I was the only one I could see who wasn't standing. I was grateful and proud when I found out that the only people in the family section who didn't stand were in my family.

Anyway, said Tenet (emphasis added).

International politics is all about "being true to your values. About having the spine to stand up for what is right. About making choices that are not simply practical or clever, but good and beneficial."
[...]
"[W]hile we must work to make things what they can be, we must never lose sight of what they should be."
[...]
Culminating his list of 8 secrets to his success:
"Seventh: Pray. Ask God for the guidance and strength to meet the challenges of life. Put on His armor to face the forces of evil. Manifest His goodness in caring for those who are weak and in need, showing love for others each and every day.

Finally, I would say to all of you-it is a little old fashioned, but you need to hear it: Love and serve your country."

That's right. We should focus our lives on praying to defeat terrorism. But more to the point, if there's any single thing that you could now say about Tenet, it is that he had anything but the spine to stand up for what was right.

As a postscript, let me just briefly mention a couple recent developments on Iraq. One of the favored tactics of Republicans trying to keep us in Iraq is the reassurance that in just a couple months things will be better and/or Republicans will bolt. Minority Leader John Boehner was the latest to use the line this weekend, but it's not new (and probably no more accurate than it was before).

On the Democratic side, the Washington Post reported last week that Democrats were all set to abandon all their principles on Iraq. It made for a great page one headline and fit right into the typical narrative that Democrats can't stand for anything they believe in. That's why it's such a shame that the story was a sham. Oh well. Maybe we'll just have to see how the debate unfolds after all!

What do we remember?

Well, it's May 1st. There are a whole bunch of things traditionally celebrated on May Day, but I usually think of International Workers' Day. Most industrialized countries celebrate their Labor Day today, in memory of the workers who were brutally suppressed at Haymarket Square right here in Chicago back in the 1880's. The raw emotions so many people attached to that event in the United States led President Cleveland to put US Labor Day in September. But people still remember. For example, immigrant laborers remember. They took to the streets of Chicago in a peaceful demonstration one year ago today:

Cleveland failed to make people forget about Haymarket just by moving the holiday. Ironically, George W. Bush, the most anti-labor President since the Great Depression, has distracted people from that tragic day without doing anything labor-related. You see, Democrats remember May 1st, 2003 as the day Bush declared "Mission Accomplished" aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. Democrats sent the supplemental funding bill to Bush today as a means of commemorating that great speech.

The Bush camp has denied having anything to do with the infamous banner, but it's a powerful image nonetheless. And, not surprisingly, the denials also happen to be a lie:

White House press secretary Scott McClellan later acknowledged that the sign was produced by the White House.

Part of remembrance is using it to help guide you in the future, so it is fair to ask, what is our current mission? both in Iraq and generally?

Some have argued that our new mission should be energy independence. The Apollo Alliance has teamed unions up with activists to push for creation of a lot of new skilled jobs, ripe for unionization, by ramping up alternative energy. But what chance do a bunch of panty-waist liberals have of getting something like this going? Those sissies that care about things like jobs and planets--who cares what they think?

Well, it turns out the most macho organization on Earth, the US military, needs to care about it, too. You'd think the strategic costs alone would have made energy independence obvious to the military long ago, since getting fuel to troops in the field has become extremely problematic. And the troops in the field need nothing like they need fuel: an Abrams tank gets a whopping 0.6 miles/gallon!

But now the military officially knows the obvious, as the Boston Globe revealed today that the Department of Defense has received a report telling them about it:

A new study ordered by the Pentagon warns that the rising cost and dwindling supply of oil -- the lifeblood of fighter jets, warships, and tanks -- will make the US military's ability to respond to hot spots around the world "unsustainable in the long term."

The study, produced by a defense consulting firm, concludes that all four branches of the military must "fundamentally transform" their assumptions about energy, including taking immediate steps toward fielding weapons systems and aircraft that run on alternative and renewable fuels. It is "imperative" that the Department of Defense "apply new energy technologies that address alternative supply sources and efficient consumption across all aspects of military operations," according to the report, which was provided to the Globe.
...
The Department of Defense is the largest single energy consumer in the country. The Air Force spends about $5 billion a year on fuel, mostly to support flight operations. The Navy and Army are close behind.

Of all the cargo the military transports, more than half consists of fuel. About 80 percent of all material transported on the battlefield is fuel.
...
The costs of relying on oil to power the military are consuming an increasing share of the military's budget, the report asserts. Energy costs have doubled since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, it says, and the cost of conducting operations could become so expensive in the future that the military will not be able to pay for some of its new weapon systems.

Creating three million new union jobs in alternative energy production, as the Apollo Alliance wants, seems to me like the perfect way to remember appropriate parties while moving forward with a new mission. In a few years, hopefully we can remember the days when labor was on the decline in America as income inequality was on the rise. And hopefully we can likewise look back on the days when we fought wars half-way around the world over oil.

Picking Nits?

Now that Democrats run Congress, some interesting investigations are getting underway, just as Republicans warned us they would. There are now some big, sexy scandals brewing as a result. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) has been holding hearings on pretty much every aspect of the corruption and incompetence surrounding Iraq. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) has been pursuing the sordid US Attorney firing scandal. But there is a much less sexy scandal brewing as well: White House staffers have been misusing their email accounts.

Various rules and regulations demand the following of White House employees:

• Using official government resources for political/party purposes is prohibited
• Using political/party resources for official government business is prohibited

Many White House employees do political work in addition to their official government duties, which is not prohibited. In order to comply with the demands of the rules, the Republican National Committee provided many White House employees, especially Karl Rove, with laptops and Blackberries to use in performing their party duties. You see, it would be not just unethical but illegal for them to use their White House email accounts to conduct party business.

The problem is that they also used their RNC emails for official government business. Business such as the politically motivated firings of US Attorneys. Froomkin explains:

The use of non-government e-mails first became an issue about four weeks ago, when some of the e-mails turned over in a congressional investigation of the firing of eight U.S. attorneys showed that Rove deputy Scott Jennings repeatedly used an RNC e-mail address (sjennings@gwb43.com) in his official communications. One e-mail to Rove was sent to a kr@georgewbush.com address.

But the problem extends beyond just using the wrong email account for the wrong job function. The White House email servers are set up to automatically back up every single email, while the RNC email servers allow users to permanently delete whatever they want. Sure enough, many vital emails were in fact deleted:

Countless e-mails to and from many key White House staffers have been deleted -- lost to history and placed out of reach of congressional subpoenas -- due to a brazen violation of internal White House policy that was allowed to continue for more than six years, the White House acknowledged yesterday.
...
Since 2004, White House staffers using those accounts have been able to save their e-mail indefinitely -- but have also been able to delete whatever they felt like deleting. By comparison, the White House e-mail system preserves absolutely everything forever, in accordance with the Presidential Records Act.

It is fairly easy to come up with some knee-jerk objections to Waxman's pursuit of such a minor 'scandal'. One could argue that Republicans all warned everyone during the 2006 campaign that a Democratic Congress would just do non-stop investigations instead of pursuing a positive agenda, and the email scandal plays right into that narrative. Since there are so many other scandals going on right now, one could argue that citizens will get so-called "scandal fatigue", whereby the marginal increase in shame per scandal goes down as the number of scandals goes up. One could also argue that by pursuing small-bore stuff like email archiving, the Democrats are just going to look like they're being vindictive as a result of the Clinton impeachment.

But, assuming Democrats handle themselves correctly, I believe this email scandal could be an essential piece of the narrative Democrats ought to be creating for 2008. For one thing, all the fishiness around Iraq and the US Attorney scandal has established a narrative of malfeasance in the White House that puts the onus on to the Administration to counter. Even if people don't pay too much particular attention to it, the email scandal could help contribute to this narrative.

An analogy can be drawn to the Mark Foley scandal from last October--it's not that Republican leadership really influenced policy by protecting a sexual predator, it's they helped people condense the narrative of corruption and arrogance that surrounded the Republican Congress. We also know from the groundbreaking work of Samuel Popkin that voters tend to form a narrative and then adjust it with new information, rather than constantly weighing and reweighing all the evidence. The email scandal could thus be extremely helpful as one more thread in a richly woven tapestry of corruption.

But better yet, since RNC email accounts were involved, it provides a link between the Bush White House and the entire Republican party (by definition) that, if properly invoked, could help in virtually every other campaign around the nation next year.

Enlightenment Watch

I've blogged previously about Bush's contempt for the enlightenment and about his dream of becoming a Sun King. A couple things came up last week that demand an update to this line of criticism. But first, a trip down memory lane.

My opponent thinks the government -- the surplus is the government's money. That's not what I think. I think it's the hard-working people of America's money and I want to share some of that money with you so you have more money to build and save and dream for your families. It's a difference of opinion.

This quote is from George W. Bush in the October 10, 2000 presidential debate. Everyone knows that because of Bush and his insatiable desire for cutting taxes and increasing spending, we have a crushing deficit far larger than anything we could have imagined in 2000. I would contend that having a solvent government would have helped the American people more than shifting the tax burden off the absurdly wealthy and onto the middle class.

But what he describes in this passage is goes beyond the woulda-shoulda-couldas of policy. It is less a a difference of opinion than a difference in the fundamental philosophy of what government is. Al Gore, apparently, supported a classical liberal view, the view that this country was founded on, the view that came out of the Enlightenment itself. George W. Bush supported, and supports to this day, a regressive view that would take us back before the Enlightenment.

You see, in a liberal democracy, the people are the government. There is no opposition between paying down the debt and rewarding the people for their hard work and prudence. The people of the United States are in debt up to their eyeballs, both personally and socially.

Fun fact: repealing the estate tax entirely would cost the people of the United States over $8 billion over the next ten years from the Walton family (owners of Wal*Mart) alone.

Anyway, on to the two updates: outsourcing tax rules and signing statements.

#1: a continued emphasis on destroying the rational-bureaucratic norms that are a central feature of all modern societies. This time it's back to the IRS, which apparently is pushing to allow private tax attorneys and accountants to just rewrite tax rules as they see fit.

In the Conservative mind, this is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Who better to write tax rules than the people who deal with them every day? So much the better that these people are willing to do it for free! There's probably no catch, and if there were, it probably wouldn't be based on rigging the tax rules to favor their clients.

In the liberal, Enlightenment view, by contrast, the people regulate themselves through the intermediary of a meritocratic bureaucracy. The bureaucracy is employed using money collected from the people and directed by politicians elected by the people. This system is good because everyone involved is accountable to everyone else. Doing it their way, the doers are accountable only to their captain of industry clients.

#2: the issue of signing statements is finally upon us in a much more tangible way. To provide a brief refresher, signing statements are the mechanism Bush has been using to assert an unjustifiably extravagant amount of Constitutional authority. The hubbub over signing statements is about a year old, but heretofore it has been largely hypothetically. Last week, the FBI put a much more real face on the situation.

It all begins with the reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act in the fall of 2005. One of the measures included was an unreasonable ability for the FBI to infringe on privacy with virtually no supervision. Some people complained about this at the time, but of course that would have meant the terrorists win. To the surprise of approximately no one, the FBI promptly turned around and abused their awesome, completely unchecked power by breaking even the modest oversight requirements in the law.

The connection here is that the signing statement Bush issued with the reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act is the very one that drew attention to the controversy over signing statements to begin with. And that signing statement spelled out very clearly that Bush intended to ignore the portions of the law that the FBI has now, indeed, ignored.

This could force a real showdown over the Constitution, which one has to believe was the intention of the Administration all along. After all, if Bush wanted to just get away with one, why would he announce he was going to break the law? Democrats in Congress, and self-respecting pundits, are already making noise about getting Alberto Gonzales to resign. Between this scandal and the politically motivated firing of otherwise competent US Attorneys, it is starting to look like Gonzales may not be able to make it too much longer, which can only be good for the country: it's time we stopped assaulting the Enlightenment.

Faith-Based Policies

I'm no lawyer, but generally I approve of having some sort of standard of evidence. Which is why it's so funny to see the oil industry shills with their backs up against the wall.

Fact: global warming is happening right now, and humans are responsible for it. The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report spells it out as starkly as such a document can. In an ironic bit of metaphor, global warming is an effect that will only snowball - the more heat gets trapped, the more the forces that trap heat speed up. There's really no denying that this is a huge problem that only we are responsible for. There's also no denying that we will have to wait until 2009, when a less evil president assumes office, in order to get started on implementing the policies we so desperately and urgently need.

As if this weren't enough reason to for the oil industry to worry, peak oil is also starting to rear its ugly head. Production at some of the largest, most productive oil fields in the world (including the crown jewel fields of Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and Alaska) has started to decline despite increased drilling. We may soon see an irreversible worldwide decline in production.

So what is the oil industry response? Via their front group, the American Petroleum Institute, it appears to be make-believe. As observed in this diary on DailyKos, the industry shills are telling us that proven reserves aren't what matter - we should be looking at un-proven reserves. In other words, let's make our policy based on faith. In oil companies. Yep, that's probably superior to evidence.

It's truly astonishing that they have now taken up methods that not even Police Detective Riley would use. Per Jack Handey:

Police Detective Riley was a no-nonsense kind of guy. Before, he really loved nonsense, and would use it a lot in his murder investigations. But he found that most people didn't appreciate it, especially the family of the victim.

Now, granted that whoever was speaking for the API was probably a PR guy, which would make him the spinmeister for a spin group. Hardly someone you should trust. But clearly the American Petroleum Industry trusts this guy, so somebody is actually embracing nonsense as a methodology for science and policy.

Fortunately, supporting this kind of statement actually does seem to finally be eroding the credibility of the oil industry. And with Obama and McCain jointly sponsoring global warming legislation, it looks like 2009 may be the beginning of the end for the oil industry. I therefore issue the API, the industry at large, Bush, and that whole gang this challenge, by way of Homer Simpson:

You couldn't fool your own mother on the foolingest day of your life with an electrified fooling machine!

Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion

Maybe I'm the only one who does this, but whenever I hear a politician being blatantly disingenuous, it makes me think of this scene from Donny Darko. We're talking the kind of dishonesty that just reeks of insincerity, inauthenticity, or a basic failure to realize how easy it is to fact-check with Google nowadays.

You see, Sparkle Motion is not a terribly profound project (see Appendix A), and there isn't much reason to be committed to it. So when a politician exhibits an insulting disregard for the actual priorities of the nation, it makes me think he's treating citizens' priorities like the mom in the doorway treats Sparkle Motion. Herewith, a roundup of recent insults to the collective intellect of America.

John McCain:
You may know John McCain (R-AZ) as the politician committed to being a maverick outsider, willing to stake himself against unregulated soft money contributions to political campaigns. He even put his name all over the issue by cosponsoring the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law of 2002 that has helped Democrats rediscover their small donor base. His partner in that endeavor, Democrat Russ Feingold, has put his money where his mouth is by voluntarily declining soft money donations. But where he should have put his money, McCain put his foot last week by actively courting the very same soft money donors he used to oppose.

Hillary Clinton:
Clinton (D-NY) is addicted to triangulation. For those who are too young or don't remember, triangulation is the practice of stabbing your allies in the back to make yourself look good. More to the point, it's the worst of squirmy political pandering. For example, triangulation would counsel a politician to support the invasion of Iraq so as to not appear too dovish, but also to not appear too out of touch with reality by acknowledging that the occupation isn't going well; instead, the politician ought to find some ill-defined middle ground from which to scuzzily stand for nothing.

Clinton took a page right out of the triangulation book this weekend in New Hampshire. A primary voter asked her to just say she was wrong about voting for the Iraq war. Instead, she stuck to her script by saying that she was right to do what she did when she did it based on the evidence she had but that she wouldn't do it again knowing what she knows now. Does she even understand how lame that sounds? No one is questioning her hindsight, we just want to know that she understands what it means to just be wrong.

Joe Lieberman
Lieberman (CfL-CT) has proved everyone right who said he was just a selfish jerk out for he, himself, and him. Incidentally, in a hilarious twist, it does not look like Lieberman will be getting the nomination for the Connecticut for Lieberman party's 2012 Senate bid, as some cantankerous malcontent in Fairfield will be holding the party's convention in his rumpus room.

But back to the latest betrayal: Lieberman made a big stink during his campaign about how he was going to hold people's feet to the fire on Katrina accountability. To the surprise of none of his critics, he promptly abandoned that promise in favor of making out with George W. Bush some more (see Appendix B). I could have sworn someone like Lieberman would have been more committed to Sparkle Motion than that.

George W. Bush
I know what you're thinking, and the answer is yes: Bush really did do something disingenuous for once, if you can believe it. Technically, there are some people who still support Bush for some reason. But defend him as much as you like, I don't think anyone serious would argue that Bush is an environmentalist. Which is why it was so hilarious (and insulting) when the Administration tried to claim last week that Bush is really on the ball with climate change science.

This is like the Pope trying to claim he's a Mormon. Are you kidding me? I know you fooled the country going into Iraq, but who do you think is really going to believe Bush has been forthright on climate change science? The Administration's claim was laid out in a letter quoting Bush from 2001 but with a generous dose of ellipses:

"First, we know the surface temperature of the earth is warming ... There is a natural greenhouse effect that contributes to warming ... And the National Academy of Sciences indicates that the increase is due in large part to human activity."

Turns out those ellipses are the places where he is saying that humans aren't to blame. Sometimes I doubt his commitment to the environment, honestly. This is like Elaine yada yada'ing sex. Come on, guy. Show us you really care about Sparkle Motion, just once.


Appendix A - Sparkle Motion in Concert



Appendix B - Bush and Lieberman, sitting in a tree

Law Giver -or- Moses and The Burning Bush

George W. Bush is a divine law giver, sanctioned by God to bring rules to all mankind. He need look nowhere but inside himself to determine what these laws are. At least, that's the impression you get if you look at his administration's actions over the last couple years.

An excellent diary today by Kagro X over at DailyKos puts this fact in stark relief by discussing the recent flap over Douglas Feith's "inappropriate" but not "unauthorized" intelligence memo. But before getting into the Feith situation, I'm going to lift the Nixon quote Kagro X cites:

Frost: "So ... what ... you're saying is that there are certain situations ... where the president can decide that it's in the best interests of the nation or something, and do something illegal."

Nixon: "Well, when the president does it that means that it is not illegal."

Frost: " By definition."

Nixon: "Exactly, exactly. If the president, for example, approves something because of the national security ... then the president's decision in that instance is one that enables those who carry it out to carry it out without violating a law."

The fact that Nixon is the one who made this comment is (a) not surprising at all and (b) the connection we need to the current administration. People like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld came of political age in the Ford administration, and they have a huge chip on their shoulders from when Congress reined in Nixon's absurd theories about the executive. Much of the unitary executive theory that crackpots in the White House subscribe to today is basically a continuation of Nixon's plans to bring Law to Man.

Which brings us back to Feith's comment that his unsavory, reprehensible, morally odious memo was not unauthorized. Who cares whether the thing was authorized if it was illegal, right? The Administration cares, because whatever the president approves becomes legal. As Kagro X also points out, that's why Alberto Gonzales felt justified to tell the Senate that the Administration was operating within the law on its blatantly illegal wiretapping program. Since the president approved that program, in the eyes of theorists at the White House, it was legal.

This concept of the "unitary executive branch" is dangerous and illegitimate, and it underlies everything Bush does. Case in point, his now-infamous signing statements. At a far higher rate than any previous president, Bush has issued statements when he signs laws that say that he will interpret the law in question "in a manner consistent with his constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch."

Note that Bush does not say he will or won't disregard any law in any specific way. All he says is that he will interpret them however his royal whim dictates.

In addition to ignoring any bill Congress passes, Bush's protection of "the...executive branch" apparently extends to ignoring any oversight Congress attempts to exert over the various cabinet departments. Senators Grassley, Leahy, and Specter (at least) have voiced strong opposition to the non-responsiveness (and at times obstructiveness) of the Department of Justice under Alberto Gonzales.

Not only does DOJ apparently refuse to provide its own responsive documents at the request of Senate committees, but it also tells other executive branch departments not to do so either. You see, DOJ is responsible for handling the legal representation of all federal agencies, and as their attorney, it has advised them not to comply with Congressional oversight requests.

In this context, what would normally be merely a disgusting misuse of power for political purposes starts to take on a much more sinister character: DOJ has also been firing US Attorneys from offices around the country to replace them with hyper-partisan loyalists. They may also take advantage of a provision of the PATRIOT Act that will allow these appointments to become indefinite without Senate confirmation. Not that they need a legal justification since every bead of Bush's sweat is as good as law.

If Bush & Co. are to be believed, he is the only part of government that matters. Heck, I bet he could play all nine positions on a baseball team, too. But I don't think this is what the framers of the Constitution had in mind when they set up three separate branches of government any more than Abner Doubleday had one-person baseball teams in mind. Since Bush's most significant experience before becoming governor of Texas was (poorly) running the Texas Rangers baseball team, maybe this shouldn't come as such a surprise.

I Gotcha Politics Right Here [gestures]

Have you noticed how people keep using this phrase "play gotcha"? (You may have noticed it here, here, here, here, or here, for example.) Sometimes it's even varied as "gotcha journalism". Using this term is basically a defensive tactic for when you believe your side is not getting a fair shake. For example, you could accuse Tim Russert of playing gotcha when he asks deceptive and irrelevant questions that he knows Howard Dean won't have an answer for. In this sense, it expresses the frustration of being marginalized by someone who isn't playing fair but controls the discourse anyway.

However, there is a much more insidious use of the term. And wouldn't you know it, our old friend Joe Lieberman is at the forefront. Lieberman recently used the term in response to a heckler. Seems this gentleman was disappointed that Lieberman promised so earnestly to investigate the Administration's response to Katrina during his campaign, only to refuse to do anything about once he had won. GOP Joe, I mean 'independent Democrat' Joe, seems to think Congress has no role in placing blame. Quoth the slimeball,

"We don't want to play `gotcha' anymore," Lieberman said. "We want to get the aid and assistance to the people of the region who need it."

Now, no one is here to say that aid and assistance should not go to the people of the region who need it (sic). But decrying gotcha politics when you're Joe Lieberman is like decrying the need to know how the nation was misled into war when you're Tony Snow. The Administration has been pretty consistent in wanting to talk about how we're going to win in Iraq instead of talking about why we're there, which makes sense because they look really bad when the conversation shifts that direction.

Gotcha politics, focusing on the present, looking forward. Whatever you want to call them, these terms all denote the tactics of people who wouldn't look so good if we focused on the past. But, as Josh Eidelson points out, gotcha politics is a pretty good thing for Washington because of one simple virtue: accountability.

If no one ever played gotcha politics, no one would ever be calling anyone on their mistakes. Entrenched beltway insiders like Lieberman would be free to make mistakes all the time, constantly undermine the fellow members of their party, and generally behave in the most selfish ways possible without ever having to answer for it. W would be within reason when he asks us to trust him on Iraq. I hope I don't need to flesh out this nightmare scenario any further.

This is where politics starts to seem like a mutual fund. Past performance is no guarantee of future results, we are constantly told. And while technically that is true, it's also pretty much the only thing we have to go on when choosing mutual funds, unless we have inside (and idiosyncratic) information on how some of the stocks in the fund will be performing. So, Joe and George, I'd love to not bother assigning blame, but you guys just keep screwing up. I personally don't have any reason to think your future results will differ greatly from your past performance.

I agree that it would be nice not to have to play gotcha politics all the time, but the solution to the problem is to stop people from screwing up. Running around whining about how much we dislike it is a deceptive, ad hominem, disingenuous tactic that ends up hurting productive political discourse more than it helps. Therefore, here here for gotcha politics.

Ford-Lincoln-Mercutio

ROMEO: I dream'd a dream to-night.
MERCUTIO: And so did I.
ROMEO: Well, what was yours?
MERCUTIO: That dreamers often lie.

It is truly bizarre how despite the fact that most Republicans in Congress and around the country have turned their backs on Bush, some just can't be cured of their Bush fetishes. They seem to see him as some sort of visionary, a dreamer who is misunderstood by the world. Dispiritingly delusional, this group includes Rudy Guiliani, the would-be Republican presidential nominee.

Holding up as examples the top two presidents in the Republican pantheon, Lincoln and Reagan, Giuliani explained their leadership qualities.

“I don’t imagine that they had those favorable/unfavorable things back during the Civil War,” but Lincoln would not have fared well, Giuliani said.

Seeming to draw present-day comparisons, Giuliani noted that Lincoln even faced riots in New York City because people were unhappy with the war. “They wanted to quit because it was getting too tough.”

There were extensive casualties, the conflict dragged on and Lincoln had to fire many of his generals, Giuliani reminded the salad-eating crowd.

For right-wing crackpots, the comparisons go (or at least ought to go) beyond simply presiding over tons of casualties and firing generals. Lincoln suspended the right of habeas corpus, as has Bush. Both Bush and Lincoln thought they were engaged in existential struggles over the very fiber of our nation. Comparing Bush to Lincoln also provides the convenience of the fact that today just about everybody thinks the Civil War was worth fighting, whereas just about no one thinks that about Iraq. This comparison does not hold up very well overall, of course.

For one thing, as opposed to Iraq, the Civil War actually was an existential struggle. If the Union had lost, the country would have been literally ripped in two. The struggle today is nothing like so serious, since Bush says the only way we can lose is to withdraw from Iraq. (Sounds fine to me.) And I don't think the reason Lincoln is popular today is the huge death toll he racked up. To tell the truth, I think it's disgusting how many people died during the Civil War all for the sake of making sure I still get to be in a country that includes Alabama. But Lincoln's rationale was more that the states cannot opt in or out of the Union at any time, forcing us to stick together whether we like it or not. In the long run, I believe this has been a healthy precedent to protect.

Another difference between Bush and Lincoln is that Lincoln didn't really have to worry that much about economic ennui. The country secession of half the country was a substantial economic disruption that had a clear military solution, and the nature of the sacrifice must have been clear to the citizen of the day. Bush, on the other hand, expressly requires no sacrifices of Americans during our present existential struggle, preferring that they just keep buying stuff. So today no one really cares what Lincoln's economic policies were, but I think a lot of people are going to keep caring about Bush's.

And the number one thing I think of when Bush and the economy come up together is his support for the plutocratic corporate order. In an excellent article, William Pfaff provides the key to explaining both Bush's foreign policy blunders and his economic blunders. An overinflated sense of American exceptionalism is probably to blame both for quixotic quagmires overseas and
the unacceptable injustice all around us. As Pfaff says,

American efforts to deregulate the international economy and promote globalization, whatever its benefits, have been the most powerful force of political, economic, social, and cultural destabilization the world has known since World War II, providing what closely resembles that "constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation" forecast by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto.

For an example of the destabilizing injustice of the corporatist plutocracy, let's look at Ford Motors. Not because Ford is unique, but because it is recent and oh so typical. As Devilstower points out over at Dailykos, Ford posted its worst loss ever last quarter. This was because of short-sighted planning and market positioning by top brass, not because guys on the assembly line weren't working hard enough. The solution? Fire 40,000 and give bigger bonuses to the top brass!

This is the kind of system we get under Bush, and, for that matter, under Clinton. As Devilstower notes, though, Democrats like Jim Webb are not on board with this system; to Webb I would add other freshman Democrats like Sherrod Brown and old salts like Barney Frank. With sensible leaders like these, hopefully we can start to fix some of the worst injustices to the middle class at least and ideally to the poor as well.

Just for the sake of fairness and balance, let me tell you about a couple of Democrats who don't appear to have received the memo on making life more fair: Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Clinton we always knew about, since she has the backing of all the elites and is so deeply allied with the DLC.

Since election to his Senate term, Obama has basically coopted the DLC playbook of valuing bipartisanship above all else. This is as self-serving and defeatist as it's ever been, but Paul Krugman is also right to point out that Obama's rhetoric about rhetoric is missing the point. A lot of people attack Obama for having a thin Senate record and wring their hands about his lack of experience, but his substance problem doesn't have that much to do with his record. Having been a civil rights attorney and spent some eight odd years in elected office, he has more substantive experience than Bush had when he became president. No, the substance argument against Obama is boils down to the fact that he thinks it's more important to establish a polite tone than to fix problems.

While Bush may be a dreamer, he is certainly no Lincoln. Neither is Clinton or Obama (who plans to officially announce his campaign around Lincoln's birthday in scenic Springfield, IL, hometown of Honest Abe himself). The next most admired leader we have will match Lincoln's courage in pursuing a dubious war with today's economic problems. In other words, we don't need a Lincoln to solve our war, we need FDR to save ourselves.